The present invention relates generally to networking, and more particularly, to OFSense: Light Weight Networking Sensing with Openflow.
Modern data centers, with plethora of technologies, devices and large scale growth in the number of applications and their deployments, it becomes imperative that we need a way to determine the state of the entire system using lightweight monitoring. This must include state of applications as well as infrastructure (e.g., network, storage, servers). The present invention builds on the fact that any system behavior deterioration will be observed by the network. However, it is not easy to utilize this as: (a) There is no central point from where such an observation is possible. (b) The amount of traffic going into the network is huge and analyzing such traffic is not scalable. (c) System behavior evolves. In this inventive technique, openflow technology is used try to build smart data center sensing applications thereby addressing (a) and (b) mentioned above.
Existing work can be coarsely classified into three categories: implementation, applications, and value added services. The first class of research work seeks to improve the scalability the OF controller by partitioning and allocating rules to authoritative switches, by introducing parallelism and additional throughput optimizing techniques, and by implementing distributed control plane. The second class of work focus on building other advanced networking devices based on OFS. Specifically, Das et al. apply OFS to construct integrated packet/circuit switching. Sherwood et al. proposed FlowVisor, which allows coexistence between production legacy protocol and new experimental ones and essentially converts a production network into a testbed. Anwer el al. developed SwitchBlade, which is a programmable hardware platform for rapid deployment of custom protocols. The third class of work applies OH to construct other services, such as DDoS detection, traffic matrix computation, dynamic access control, and load balancing.
Accordingly, there is a need for determining the state of an entire network system using lightweight monitoring, which includes state of applications as well as infrastructure (e.g., network, storage, servers).